There is a basic rule which is covered in the first book and which was more specifically delineated by Fellow of Scientology Dick Halpern, that the psychotic is concerned with the past, the neurotic is barely able to keep up with the present, and the sane, as we jokingly called homo sapiens in 1950, are concerned with the future.
This division could be more specifically made by realizing that the neurotic is barely able to confront the present but that the very, very sane confront the present entirely and have very little concern for the future, being competent enough in handling the present to let the future take care of itself. Looking into the past and looking into the extreme future alike are efforts to avoid present time and efforts to look elsewhere than at something.
You have known people who would reply on an entirely different subject when asked about anything; when consulted concerning the weather, they would reply about a meteorologist. The inability to look at something becomes first manifest by thinking before looking; and then the actual target at which one should be looking is more and more avoided until it is hidden entirely in a mix-up of complications comparable to a government bureau. This is the mechanism of the post-hypnotic suggestion as covered in Book 1.
Here basically we have people’s fear of things exploding. Any and every serious injury which has left the preclear hung up on the time track appeared to him at the time as an explosion and actually might have contained an electrical discharge. You will find preclears with ailing stomachs who will trace the moment when they began to have stomach trouble to the feeling that something had exploded in their stomachs. Thereafter they will be trying to keep the explosion from happening again and will avoid looking at the explosion. Running cycles of explosions as covered in PAB No. 12 resolves this condition. It permits people to look straight at things again without fear. People who wear glasses and, indeed, people who are blind, cannot look straight at something but must either avoid looking at it or not look at it at all.
The avoidance of reality is merely an avoidance of present time. Theta could be considered to be a sort of scanner which is motionless. It is not moving. The MEST universe is changing and interchanging, and the products and forms constructed and organized or regulated by theta change, and this change is in itself time. Time depends mainly upon the creation of new space in the MEST universe. It could be hazarded that new space is created in the MEST universe at the rate of l/c,
An individual who will not look at the MEST universe must look either ahead of it into the future or behind it into the past. One of the reasons he does this is because there is insufficient action in the present to begin with; and then this thirst for action develops into an inability to have action and he decides that all must be maintained in a constant state and he seeks to prevent action. This also applies to pain. People who are somewhat out of present time have a horrible dread of pain, and people who are truly out of present time — as in a psychotic state — have a revulsion towards pain which could not be described. A person entirely within present time is not much concerned with pain and even might create some for the sake of randomity. Although people have hard words for the sadist, it must be remarked that the sadist rarely permits any pain to happen to himself.
The avoidance of work is one of the best indicators of a decayed state on the part of a personality. There are two common denominators to all aberrated personalities; one of these is a horror of work and the other is a horror of pain. People only mildly out of present time, which is to say, people who are categorized as sane, have already started to apologize about work in that they work toward an end reward and no longer consider that the output of effort itself and the accomplishment of things is sufficient reward in itself — thus the whole network of gratitude or admiration as necessary pay for energy put forth. The parental demand for gratitude is often reflected in a severely aberrated preclear who is given to feel he can never repay the enormous favors conferred on him by being worked for by his parents. Actually, they need not be paid; for, flatly, if it was not sufficient reward to do the work of raising him, they are beyond being paid; in other words, they could not accept pay.
Taking the very, very sane person in present time, one would mark a decline of his sanity by a shift from an interest in present time to an overwhelming interest in the future, which would decline into considerable planning for the future in order to avoid bad things happening in it, to, finally, a shunning of the future because of painful incidents, to a shuddering and tenuous hold on present time, and then an avoidance of both the future and present time and a shift into the past. This last would be a psychotic state and is, indeed, the definition of a psychotic state in Scientology.
An extremely effective remedy for a person whose concern about the future is great is the application of Creative Processing in brackets, having him mock up repeatedly and in great quantities, as in PAB No. 8, horrible things happening to himself, to others, and others making horrible things happen to others, all in the future. One would find out what this person had originally worked toward in the future, and then would discover its decline. One would then have horrible things mocked up to make the goal impossible and unreachable. In the case of a mechanic, one would have him mock up being fired, being mangled by the machinery, being left by his wife and children because he was only a mechanic, being shunned by the factory, making terrible mistakes which brought death to his fellow workers, having other people have similar things happening to them, and other people making other people undergo similar future experiences.
One holds on to things in the past on the postulate that they must not happen in the future. This sticks the person in the past. This is, in essence, the whole goal of education and experience. One is trying to instill into somebody sufficient fear of the future in order to cause him to be cautious. This, of course, holds the individual on the track.
The ultimate failure, of course, is death, and an auditor will be surprised how avidly a preclear will mock up his own death, death for members of the family now living, and how rapidly this will bring into view grief charges on people who are already dead. But one should not merely have the preclear mock himself up dead; one should have him dying several varieties of deaths; and then, of course, being put into a coffin, stuck in the body and unable to get out and lying there in a mouldering or formaldehyded corpse for aeons and aeons and never escaping. Edgar Allan Poe, by the way, is a wonderful source of such mock-ups.
This method of processing the future can be combined with SSSA.
Inaction and indecision in the present is because of fear of consequences of the future. Once one has made the preclear mock up these consequences in quantity, he can more comfortably face present time.